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Spielberg sued for plagiarizing Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW

September 9th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Steve stared too long and stole too much

According to the lawsuit, filed by the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust, Steve Spielberg’s Dreakworks Entertainment shamelessly “borrowed” the plot from The Master’s Rear Window for last year’s Disturbia.

High five me!

According to Yahoo! Movies, “Dreamworks, its parent company Viacom Inc, and Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric Co’s NBC Universal, are accused of copyright infringement and breach of contract for making Disturbia without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders, the suit said.”

Executive Producer Steve is named as a defendant.

Instead of a convalescing Jimmy Stewart witnessing a killing across the courtyard, Disturbia places Shia “Indy, Jr.” LaBeouf under house arrest and has him peep on a murderous neighbor.

The rights to Cornell Woolrich’s short story Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint, were purchased by Hitch and James Stewart in 1953 and transformed into Rear Window. In 1971, Hollywood producer Sheldon Abend bought the rights to the short story. The lawsuit claims that in 1991, Abend obtained “exclusive right to adapt or copy the story.” In 1998, Abend produced a dreadful TV remake designed as a vehicle (no pun intended) for wheelchair bound Christopher Reeve. Abend died in 2003, but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in New York last week because it claims the makers of Disturbia did not obtain the rights to the story before raping Alfred Hitchcock’s bones.

The Daily Telegraph reports, “The trust complain of copyright infringement and breach of contract. The lawsuit said: “What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation. “In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story.’”

No word yet on whether the Ford Bebe estate is considering a similar lawsuit for Steve’s using his Monogram serials as the basis for the Indiana Jones series.

Music to listen to while enjoying this post

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DISTURBIA / D.J. Caruso (2007)

April 8th, 2007 by Scott Marks

Disturbia (2007)
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Written by: Christopher B. Landon, Carl Ellsworth
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Aaron Yoo, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Matt Craven, Viola Davis, Brandon Caruso, Luciano Rauso, Daniel Caruso, Kevin Quinn, Elyse Mirto, Suzanne Rico, Kent Shocknek
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Running Time: 104 min.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Shia LeBoeuf has been making the talk show circuit swearing up and down that Disturba is not a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He must not have seen the trailer.

It all began so peacefully with Kale (LeBoeuf) and his dad bonding on an idyllic fishing trip. Make sure to notice the Coca-Cola cans. Not only is it great product placement, but when their car overturns on the ride home, it assures us that the cause of dad’s death was an accident, not a DUI.

Kale was behind the wheel. A year later he belts a teacher who asks what his father would think of Kale’s indolent behavior. The punch earns him three months house arrest complete with a Government Issue anklet.

Initially Kale whiles away the days watching TV and consuming mass quantities of peanut butter, Hershey’s syrup and Red Bull. Even though his mom Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) insists that he keep the place tidy, the hardest work Kale does is stomping on the doody-filled plastic bag the pesky neighbor kids set ablaze on his porch.

While testing the limits of his leg bracelet Kale notices Ashley (Sarah Roemer, who’s more Kate Hudson than Grace Kelly), the pretty new next door neighbor whose bedroom he can peer into from his dead dad’s office. Kale’s scoptophilia doesn’t stop with sexy neighbors. He also has a hunch that Mr. Turner’s (David Morse) dented blue Mustang is the same one belonging to a serial killer being talked about on the evening news.

So far, so Hitchcock. Even though it was a flagrant rip-off, I was going along for the ride. The genius of Rear Window is that Jimmy Stewart is trapped in a wheelchair (this was decades before the Americans with Disabilities Act) and unable to leave his home. The entire film takes place inside his apartment and, with the exception of a couple of shots towards the end, exclusively from Stewart’s POV.

Imagine mother figure Thelma Ritter strolling across the courtyard for a hot date with wife-killer Lars Thorwald, yet that’s precisely what Julie does. David Morse is a superb screen psycho, but even he can’t successfully transform the Ray Burr figure into Halloween’s Michael Meyers.

Instead of trusting the characters, not to mention Hitchcock’s foolproof blueprint, the screenplay dead ends with a thing-that-wouldn’t-die formula. Kale’s friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo doing a damn fine Wendell Corey) sneaks a camcorder into Turner’s garage to get video evidence of a blue recycling bag filled with guts. Instead of sustaining suspense, D.J. Caruso delivers Blair Witch visuals and an ill-timed goof by comic relief Ronnie.

The most disturbing thing about the AMC Mission Valley screening that I attended was the sloppy presentation. For years I didn’t have to leave the auditorium in mid-screening to complain about projection. Now I seem to spend as much time in the lobby as I do the theater.

Every projectionist I ever had the pleasure of working with knew my two favorite booth mantras: “There are two kinds of focus: in and out” and “The projectionist has final cut.” AMC whined that the prints frequently arrive late for screenings and have to be assembled on the fly. It takes just as much time to do it wrong as it does right. Four sprocket holes on each side and you cut and splice in the middle. Once you learn it, you never forget.

The film jumped frame twice, the second infraction taking ten minutes to resolve. If it was a Scorsese screening I’d have killed somebody, but I’m tired of complaining, particularly about a tepid merger of Cornell Woolrich and a William Shatner mask. I sat comfortably positioned in the center of the row and didn’t feel like once again scaling patrons. It’s not my job.

How must the studios feel when the word-of-mouth screening audience, unaware that it’s a framing problem, tells their friends that the boom microphone had a starring role in the feature? Bottom line, movie theaters are here to do two things: sell concessions and show movies.How hard can it be? Bring back union projectionists and let the managers and candy counter kids stay in the lobby and herd customers.

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Filed Under Reviews, Theatrical